The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  I nodded. “She is quite determined neither to leave nor marry.”

  “King Philip will keep her at court now, and make her his friend, I should think.”

  “Why?”

  “One baby, as yet unborn, is not enough to secure the throne,” he pointed out. “And next in line is Elizabeth. If the queen were to die in childbirth he would be in a most dangerous position: trapped in England and the new queen and all her people his enemies.”

  I nodded.

  “And if he were to disinherit Elizabeth then the next heir would be Mary, married to the Prince of France. D’you not think that our Spanish King Philip would rather see the devil incarnate on the English throne than the King of France’s son?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “You can remind Elizabeth that she is in a stronger position now that Philip is on the queen’s council. There’s not many of them that can think straight there; but he certainly can. Is Gardiner still trying to persuade the queen to declare Elizabeth a bastard and disinherit her?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Robert Dudley smiled. “I warrant he is. Actually, I know he is.”

  “You’re very well informed for a friendless prisoner without news or visitors,” I observed tartly.

  He smiled his dark seductive smile. “No friends as dear to me as you, sweetheart.”

  I tried not to smile back but I could feel my face warming at his attention.

  “You have grown into a young woman indeed,” he said. “Time you were out of your pageboy clothes, my bird. Time you were wed.”

  I flushed quickly at the thought of Daniel and what he would make of Lord Robert calling me “sweetheart” and “my bird.”

  “And how is the swain?” Lord Robert asked, dropping into the chair at his desk and putting his boots up on the scattered papers. “Pressing his suit? Passionate? Urgent?”

  “Busy in Padua,” I said with quiet pride. “Studying medicine at the university.”

  “And when does he come home to claim his virgin bride?”

  “When I am released from Elizabeth’s service,” I said. “Then I will join him in France.”

  He nodded, thoughtful. “You know that you are a desirable woman now, Mistress Boy? I would not have known you for the little half lad that you were.”

  I could feel my cheeks burning scarlet but I did not drop my eyes like some pretty servant, overwhelmed by the master’s smile. I kept my head up and I felt his look flicker over me like a lick.

  “I would never have taken you while you were a child,” he said. “It’s a sin not to my taste.”

  I nodded, waiting for what was coming next.

  “And not while you were scrying for my tutor,” he said. “I would not have robbed either of you of your gift.”

  I stayed silent.

  “But when you are a woman grown and another man’s wife you can come to me, if you desire me,” he said. His voice was low, warm, infinitely tempting. “I would like to love you, Hannah. I would like to hold you in my arms and feel your heart beat fast, as I think it is doing now.” He paused. “Am I right? Heart thudding, throat dry, knees weak, desire rising?”

  Silently, honestly, I nodded.

  He smiled. “So I shall stay this side of the table and you shall stay that, and you shall remember when you are a virgin and a girl no longer, that I desire you, and you shall come to me.”

  I should have protested my genuine love and respect for Daniel, I should have raged at Lord Robert’s arrogance. Instead I smiled at him as if I agreed, and stepped slowly backward, one step after another, from the desk until I reached the door.

  “Can I bring you anything when I come again?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Don’t come until I send for you,” he ordered coolly, very far from my own state of arousal. “And stay clear of Kat Ashley and Elizabeth for your own sake, my bird, after you have given your message. Don’t come to me unless I send for you by name.”

  I nodded, felt the wood of the door behind me, and tapped on it with fingers which trembled.

  “But you will send for me?” I persisted in a small voice. “You won’t just forget about me?”

  He put his fingers to his lips and blew me a kiss. “Mistress Boy, look around, do you see a court of men and women who adore me? I have no visitors but my wife and you. Everyone else has slipped away but the two women that love me. I do not send for you often because I do not choose to endanger you. I doubt that you want the attention of the court directed to who you are, and where you come from, and where your loyalties lie, even now. I send for you when I have work for you, or when I cannot go another day without seeing you.”

  The soldier swung open the door behind me but I could not move.

  “You like to see me?” I whispered. “Did you say that sometimes you cannot go another day without seeing me?”

  His smile was as warm as a caress and as lightly given. “The sight of you is one of my greatest pleasures,” he said sweetly. Then the soldier gently put a hand under my elbow, and I went out.

  Spring — Summer 1555

  At Hampton Court they made the room ready for the queen’s confinement. The privy chamber behind her bedroom was hung with the richest of tapestries especially chosen for their holy and encouraging scenes. The windows were bolted shut so that not a breath of air should come into the room. They tied the posts of the bed with formidable and frightening straps that she might cling to, while her labor tore her thirty-nine-year-old body apart. The bed was dressed with a magnificent pillow cover and counterpane which the queen and her ladies had been embroidering since her wedding day. There were great log piles beside the stone fireplace so that the room could be heated to fever pitch. They shrouded the floors with carpets so that every sound should be muffled and they brought in the magnificent royal cradle with a two-hundred-and-forty-piece layette for the boy who would be born within the next six weeks.

  At the head of the magnificent cradle was carved a couplet to welcome the prince:

  The child which Thou to Mary, oh Lord of Might, does sendTo England’s joy: in health preserve, keep, and defend

  In the rooms outside the privy chambers were midwives, rockers, nurses, apothecaries and doctors in a constant stream of coming and going, and everywhere the nursemaids ran with piles of freshly laundered linen to store in the birthing chamber.

  Elizabeth, now free to walk in the palace, stood on the threshold of the confinement room with me. “All those weeks in there,” she said in utter horror. “It would be like being walled up alive.”

  “She needs to rest,” I said. Secretly I was afraid for the queen in that dark room. I thought that she would be ill if she were to be kept from the light and the sunshine for so long. She would not be allowed to see the king, nor to have any company or music or singing or dancing. She would be like a prisoner in her own chamber. And in less than two months’ time, when the baby would come, it would be unendurably hot, locked into that room, curtained in darkness and shrouded in cloth.

  Elizabeth stepped back from the doorway with an ostentatiously virginal shudder, and led the way through the presence chamber and into the gallery. Long solemn portraits of Spanish grandees and princes now lined the walls. Elizabeth went past them without turning her head, as if by ignoring them she could make them disappear.

  “Funny to think of her releasing me from prison just as she goes into her confinement,” she said, hiding her glee as best she could. “If she knew what it was like being trapped inside four walls she would change the tradition. I will never be locked up again.”

  “She will do her duty for the baby,” I said firmly.

  Elizabeth smiled, holding to her own opinion with serene self-confidence. “I hear you went to see Lord Robert in the Tower.” She took my arm and drew me close to her, so that she could whisper.

  “He wanted some writing paper from my father’s old shop,” I replied steadily.


  “He gave you a message for Kat,” Elizabeth pursued. “She told me herself.”

  “I delivered it to her, herself. About ribbons,” I said dampeningly. “He is accustomed to use me as his haberdasher and stationer. It is where he first saw me, at my father’s shop.”

  She paused and looked at me. “So you know nothing about anything, Hannah?”

  “Exactly so,” I said.

  “You won’t see this then,” she said smartly, and released her hold on me to turn and smile over her shoulder at a gentleman in a dark suit, who had come out of a side room behind us and was following us, walking slowly in our wake.

  To my amazement I recognized the king. I pressed myself back against the wall and bowed, but he did not even notice me, his eyes were fixed on Elizabeth. His pace quickened as he saw the momentary hesitation in Elizabeth’s step, as she paused and smiled at him; but she did not turn and curtsey as she should have done. She walked serenely down the length of the gallery, her hips slightly swaying. Her every pace was an invitation to any man to follow her. When she reached the end of the gallery at the paneled door she paused, her hand on the handle, and turned to glance over her shoulder, an open challenge to him to follow, then she slipped through the door and in a second she was gone, leaving him staring after her.

  The weather grew warmer and the queen lost some of her glow. In the first week of May, having left it as late as she could, she said farewell to the court and went through the doors of her privy chamber to the darkened interior where she must stay until the birth of her boy, and for six weeks after that, before being churched. The only people to see her would be her ladies; the queen’s council would have to take their orders from the king, acting in her stead. Messages would be passed into the chamber by her ladies, though it was already being whispered that the queen had asked the king to visit her privately. She could not tolerate the thought of not seeing him for three months, however improper it was that he should come to her at such a time.

  Thinking of the look that Elizabeth had shot the king, and how he had followed her swaying hips down the long gallery like a hungry dog, I thought that the queen was well advised to ask him to visit, whatever the tradition of royal births. Elizabeth was not a girl that anyone should trust with their husband, especially when the wife was locked away for a full quarter of the year.

  The baby was a little late, the weeks came and went with no sign of him. The midwives predicted a stronger baby for taking his own time and an easier labor when it started, which it must do, any day now. But as May went by they started to remark that it was an exceptionally late baby. The nursemaids rolled their swaddling bandages and started to talk about getting fresh herbs for strewing. The doctors smiled and tactfully suggested that a lady as spiritual and otherworldly as the queen might have mistaken the date of conception; we might have to wait till the end of the month.

  While the long hot dull weeks of waiting dragged on there was an embarrassing moment when some rumor set the city of London alight with the news that the queen had given birth to a son. The city went wild, ringing bells and singing in the streets, and the revelers roistered all the way to Hampton Court to learn that nothing had happened, that we were all still waiting, that there was nothing to do but wait.

  I sat with Queen Mary every day in the shrouded room. Sometimes I read to her from the Bible in Spanish, sometimes I gave her little pieces of news about the court, or told her Will’s latest nonsense. I took flowers in for her, hedgerow flowers like daisies, and then the little roses in bud, anything to give her a sense that there was still an outside world which she would rejoin soon. She took them with a smile of pleasure. “What, are the roses in bud already?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “I shall be sorry to miss the sight of them this year.”

  As I had feared, the darkness and quietness of the room was preying on her spirits. With the curtains drawn and the candles lit, it was too dark to sew for very long without gaining a splitting headache, it was a chore to read. The doctors had ruled that she should not have music, and the ladies soon ran out of conversation. The air grew stale and heavy, filled with woodsmoke from the hot fire, and the sighs of her imprisoned companions. After a morning spent with her I found I was coming out of the doors at a run, desperate to be out again in the fresh air and sunshine.

  The queen had started the confinement with a serene expectation of giving birth soon. Like any woman facing a first labor she was a little afraid, the more so since she was really too old to have a first child. But she had been borne up by her conviction that God had given her this child, that the baby had quickened when the Papal legate had returned to England, that this conception was a sign of divine favor. Mary, as God’s handmaiden, had been confident. But as the days wore on into weeks, her contentment was undermined by the delay. The good wishes that came pouring in from all around the country were like a string of demands for a son. The letters from her father-in-law, the emperor, inquiring as to the delay, read like a reproach. The doctors said that all the signs showed that the baby was coming soon, but still he did not come.

  Jane Dormer went around with a face like thunder. Anyone who dared to ask after the health of the queen was stared out of countenance for their impertinence. “Do I look like some village witch?” she demanded of one woman in my hearing. “Do I look like an astrologer, casting spells, guessing birth dates? No? The Queen’s Grace will take to her bed when she thinks fit and not before, and we shall have a prince when God grants it and not before.”

  It was a staunch defense and it could hold off the courtiers, but it could not protect the queen from her own painful growing unease. I had seen her unhappy and fearful before and I recognized the gauntness of her face as the shine was rubbed off her.

  Elizabeth, in contrast, now free to go where she would, ride where she liked, boat, walk, play at sports, grew more and more confident as the summer drew on. She had lost the fleshiness that had come with her illness, she was filled with energy and zest for life. The Spanish adored her — her coloring alone was fascinating to them. When she rode her great gray hunter in her green riding habit with her copper hair spread out on her shoulders they called her Enchantress, and Beautiful Brass-head. Elizabeth would smile and protest at the fuss they made, and so encourage them even more.

  King Philip never checked them, though a more careful brother-in-law would have guarded against Elizabeth’s head being turned by the flattery of his court. But he never said anything to rein in her growing vanity. Nor did he speak now of her marrying and going away from England, nor of her visit to his aunt in Hungary. Indeed, he made it clear that Elizabeth was an honored permanent member of the court and heir to the throne.

  I thought this was mostly policy on his part; but then one day I was looking from the palace window to a sheltered lawn on the south side of the palace and I saw a couple walking, heads close together, down the yew tree allée, half hidden and then half revealed by the dark strong trees. I smiled as I watched, thinking at first that it was one of the queen’s ladies with a Spanish courtier, and the queen would laugh when I told her of this clandestine courtship.

  But then the girl turned her head and I saw a flash from under her dark hood, the unmistakable glint of copper hair. The girl was Elizabeth, and the man walking beside her, close enough to touch but not touching, was Prince Philip: Mary’s husband. Elizabeth had a book open in her hands, her head was bowed over it, she was the very picture of the devout student, but her walk was the gliding hip-swaying stroll of a woman with a man matching his step to hers.

  All at once, I was reminded of the first time I had seen Elizabeth, when she had teased Tom Seymour, her stepmother’s husband, to chase her in the garden at Chelsea. This might be seven years later, but it was the same aroused hot-blooded girl who slid a dark sideways glance at another woman’s husband and invited him to come a little closer.

  The king looked back at the palace, wondering how many people might be watching from the windows, an
d I expected him to weigh the danger of being seen, and take the Spanish way, the cautious way. But instead he gave a reckless shrug of his shoulders and fell into step a little closer to Elizabeth, who gave a start of innocent surprise, and put her long index finger under the word in her book so that she should not lose her place. I saw her look up at him, the color rising in her cheeks, her eyes wide with innocence, but the sly smile on her lips. He slipped his arm around her waist so that he could walk with her, looking over her shoulder at the passage in her book as if they both could see the words, as if they cared for anything but the other’s touch, as if they were not utterly absorbed in the sound of their own rapid breathing.

  I put myself outside Elizabeth’s door that night and waited for her and her ladies to go to dinner.

  “Ah, fool,” she said pleasantly as she came out of her rooms. “Are you dining with me?”

  “If you wish, Princess,” I said politely, falling into her train. “I saw a curious thing today in the garden.”

  “In which garden?” she asked.

  “The summer garden,” I said. “I saw two lovers walking side by side and reading a book.”

  “Not lovers,” she said easily. “You lack the Sight if you saw lovers, my fool. That was the king and I, walking and reading together.”

  “You looked like lovers,” I said flatly. “From where I was standing. You looked like a courting couple.”

  She gave a little gurgle of delighted laughter. “Oh well,” she said negligently. “Who can say how they appear to others?”

  “Princess, you cannot want to be sent back to Woodstock,” I said to her urgently. We were approaching the great double doors of the dining hall at Hampton Court and I was anxious to warn her before we had to enter and all eyes would be on her.

  “How would I be sent back to Woodstock?” she demanded. “The queen herself released me from arrest and accusation before she locked herself up, and I know that I am innocent of any plot. The king is my friend and my brother-in-law, and an honorable man. I am waiting, like the rest of England, to rejoice at the birth of my sister’s baby. How might I offend?”